


The Death of the Blue

by tin_girl



Category: Durarara!!
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, M/M, Post-Canon, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-23
Updated: 2019-09-23
Packaged: 2020-10-27 01:09:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,602
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20751830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tin_girl/pseuds/tin_girl
Summary: “Shizu-chan will eat me whole, then? Like I’m an ortolan! Be careful to shield your face so God doesn’t see, though! It’s a messy business, see, bones and feathers and even the beak—”“You don’t have feathers,” Shizuo said, wondering what it was all about, surprised into a momentary peace.“I don’t have wings, either, I suppose,” Izaya laughed, and Shizuo thought, but how you fly.Or, the story of how Shizuo learns to stop dreaming in sad colors.





	The Death of the Blue

**Author's Note:**

> Translation into Russian here: https://ficbook.net/readfic/9134358 (!!!<3)
> 
> I decided to rate this mature since it contains mentions of violence but there's nothing too graphic described in detail. Also, references to ortolan-eating, which is a very disturbing practice indeed.
> 
> This will always be my Shizaya fanfic that's worse than my other Shizaya fanfic, but what can you do?

My protecting hand is useless, that wants to hold the single leaf in the tree

and say, _Not this one, this one will be saved_

~Jane Hirshfield, One Sand Grain Among the Others in Winter Wind

It’s the usual – vending machines flying and street signs bent into crowbars, Izaya laughing at gravity and Shizuo’s bones straining like they used to when they were still in the habit of breaking – only later, when Shizuo reaches into his pocket, his cigarettes are not there.

He pats his chest and sides absent-mindedly, but nothing flattens under his hands. He looks up to where the sky is punctured with rooftop antennae like something that gave up and collapsed to its death, half-expecting to see Izaya there, grin scratched into the air for all to see, but meant just for Shizuo. He remembers Izaya close, remembers their noses almost touching, remembers the _smell_—

He doesn’t remember a hand reaching into his pocket, but it figures – Izaya’s always had wicked fingers and there’s something about his eyes that distracts like the strike of a match.

“How petty,” Shizuo whispers instead of yelling, his throat raw and his hand constantly closing on nothing. He gets some cheap cigarettes on the way home and doesn’t think of Izaya’s fingers. Back at his apartment, he drinks milk straight out the bottle, staring at the mold stains on the wall, and still doesn’t think of Izaya’s fingers. He keeps the fridge open for too long, listening to its quiet buzz and doesn’t—

It’s only when Shinra calls him that he allows himself to think about Izaya’s fingers, and then it’s hard to imagine them anything but waving, a mocking goodbye, and screw him, screw him, screw him, screw them all.

*

“Ransom?” Shizuo says when he gets to Shinra’s apartment, and Celty puts her hand on his shoulder as if to calm him down, when he’s perfectly calm, God damn it. She hands him a glass of water, and ice clinks inside, making Shizuo nervous. Once it melts, will it already be too late?

“Yes, I know, it doesn’t make much sense, does it? Better have someone dear to Izaya kidnapped and demand information from him, if anything—”

Once, Shizuo would have laughed at the ‘someone dear to Izaya’ bit, but now he remembers Izaya cracked open and spilling too soon like egg yolk, telling Shizuo his secrets and how they hurt worse than any knife ever did.

“You’re not even rich,” he says, quiet. He wishes he could understand this, but he’s never been good at puzzles and he knows that the world has the habit of having you solve them without giving you all the pieces.

“I’m financially comfortable—” Shinra argues, but Shizuo’s not listening anymore. 

Once, amidst pieces of the city flying at him, Izaya asked Shizuo what color was the most recurring one in his dreams. Was it red? He laughed, jumping form a billboard to a car roof – and the alarm didn’t even go off – to the top of a streetlamp where he balanced so against every possibility that Shizuo forgot how much he hated him for a moment and held his breath. Brown, then? Like dried blood? Oh, but you never hang around long enough for it to dry, Shizu-chan, do you?

“What color are yours?” Shizuo asked, tightening his hold on a bent stop sign, trying to keep himself from throwing it. There was something in his blood, older than himself, that yearned to destroy not only what was hateful but also what was beautiful. An instinct as old as time, like when you look up at an expensive china set placed on a shelf and half want to keep it whole but half want to smash it to pieces – and of course, how did he not realize before?

Izaya, for all his ugly smiles was—

Surprised for once – caught off guard, even – Izaya smiled and told him his dreams were blue.

Much later, Izaya gone already, Shizuo remembered someone at school telling him that blue was but a shade of grey, or was it the other way around?

It would be weeks before Izaya talked to him about love.

“Don’t they know that most people wouldn’t bother rescuing him even if they were paid, much less if they had to pay themselves?” Shizuo says, and his fingers itch, even though he’s already smoked through half a pack of cigarettes ever since Shinra called.

“They don’t know but Izaya does,” Shinra says, half-giddy, half-sad. “When they called and had him beg into the phone, he asked me to tell you to quit smoking instead.”

Oh, how it hurts.

“He thinks he’ll die and worries about me quitting?” Shizuo says, wishing Celty would let go of his shoulder. He can feel something rising in him, and thinks he might hurt her if she doesn’t step back, even though shadows can’t be hurt. “Doesn’t sound like Izaya, that.”

But when has Izaya last sounded anything like himself?

“Then they kicked him in the ribs, I think, and he whined some,” Shinra adds, stretching his arms behind his back like it’s the end of a long day and not the end of the world, and Shizuo wants to hurt him more than he’s ever wanted to hurt Izaya. Celty hits Shinra on the shoulder, and Shizuo remembers how once, back in high school, they were fighting in a music room, him and Izaya, and how he threw a piano before he could feel the weight of it and think of sonatas. He remembers how it hit the wall and how, later, he couldn’t stand to look at the smashed keys, spilled like teeth after a fistfight, how he couldn’t bear the thought that they would never again make a sound.

The glass breaks in Shizuo’s hand, pieces of it burrowing deep in his skin and water going everywhere, ice cubes spilling on the floor like a roll of dice, only it’s not dice Shizuo’s thinking of, but coins. The throw of a dirty, 100-yen coin and how it cut – _cuts_ – through air, rotating, everything but fate holding its breath.

“The skin between the ribs,” he says, looking to Shinra hopelessly, dripping blood all over the floor. “Is it soft?”

Shinra smiles with pity, and Shizuo remembers how he’s never told Izaya that he dreams in blue, too.

*

It was an August day when it started, a heatwave, and Shizuo thought that if Izaya dared step into Ikebukuro, he’d kill him for real. There was something about sweat beneath his collar and dry throat that always made Shizuo think of crushing Izaya to a much smaller, pathetic shape, and when he noticed the fur lining and the sharp smile, he reached for three heavy things at once and bit through his cigarette in anger, ash coating the inside of his mouth. He yelled something about fleas and something about chewing Izaya to a pulp, and Izaya laughed like a kid in an amusement park would in the middle of a ride.

“Shizu-chan will eat me whole, then? Like I’m an ortolan! Be careful to shield your face so God doesn’t see, though! It’s a messy business, see, bones and feathers and even the beak—”

“You don’t have feathers,” Shizuo said, wondering what it was all about, surprised into a momentary peace.

“I don’t have wings, either, I suppose,” Izaya laughed, and Shizuo thought, but how you fly.

Later, Shizuo grabbed a fistful of Izaya’s jacket, and Izaya should have weaseled out of it or cut him with a flip blade and gotten away, but he stayed put instead, surrendering to Shizuo’s fingers as if he longed to be hurt. Shizuo had one hand curled around Izaya’s collar, and the other’s fingers digging into Izaya’s forearm, and it terrified him how little it would take to break the bones there, and it terrified him how he was scared of breaking them in the first place.

Izaya tilted his head back, and Shizuo thought, stupidly, that necks were where noses went.

“Izaya,” he started, wondering if that was really all it took for the world to change, one of them no longer running for as long as an exhale. “Don’t you ever get hungry?”

He’d been thinking of nourishment, of how if you didn’t eat, your stomach would clench, demanding food, and of how it must have been similar with love.

Don’t you ever get lonely?

Isn’t blue the color of loneliness?

How can you dream in blue and not go crazy, the way you are?

“Hungry? No,” Izaya said, just like Shizuo had expected, only then he smiled the way people do when they know something is over, when someone says ‘see you later’ but doesn’t mean it. “I’m _starving_,” he choked out in a broken voice, and Shizuo unconsciously moved his fingers down his forearm until he felt Izaya’s crazy pulse under his thumb.

Shizuo frowned – he didn’t expect Izaya to admit it, not to him, not to himself – and wondered at how Izaya was the most alive of all the people Shizuo’s ever seen, at how he seemed too small for all that glee, all that blood, all that pulse.

Izaya freed himself, Shizuo’s grip slackened by shock, and he stepped back, fingers curling into Shizuo’s collar. Shizuo followed, not because he couldn’t resist the physical pull of it, but because he was too hopeless not to, cold in the lack burned into the world where Izaya had been standing. A truck rushed past behind him, and Shizuo stared at Izaya, uncomprehending. Izaya grinned, a teenager again, and what happened to manipulating Shizuo into getting run over by cars?

Later, Shizuo would think about those birds Izaya had mentioned, would read about how people ate them in one mouthful, juices trickling and a handkerchief over their heads to hide the sin of it from God. He would think of bird hearts and Izaya’s pulse and of how the world would chew him to nothing if Izaya let it.

That’s why he won’t let it, he would realize, slowly, waking from blue dreams.

“If you ever end up killing me,” Izaya said, the truck long gone. “Can you do it with your hands?”

He smiled, something self-deprecating about it, then saluted and was off, the eagerness of his blood seeming to still throb under Shizuo’s twitching fingers.

*

“Where is he?” Shizuo growls, batting Shinra’s hand away from his bloodied palm. “Where did they take him?”

“Shizu-chan, I don’t have that kind of money, do you not know?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“What will you do if they’ll have a gun to his head?” Shinra says, exasperated, and Shizuo remembers that time when he smelled too much vodka and found Izaya, slumped in an alleyway and laughing at the world, or maybe at himself, lips chewed to blood and eyes flashing like church candles, only he’d never be allowed in any temple.

*

“Shizu-chan!” he said, giddy, a half-empty bottle in his hand, and Shizuo hadn’t smoked enough cigarettes for that. “Just who I was looking for!”

“You stink,” Shizuo said, towering over him, and wondered if Izaya had a flick blade open in his pocket, ready to slash everything to ribbons, wondered if Izaya’s world was swimming, and if in all that blue, everyone in Ikebukuro was a shark.

Shizuo reached out, not to hit, not to – to take the bottle of vodka away, maybe, or to search for that hot pulse again, sudden like a refrain and too close to skin – but Izaya escaped him, wobbly but not wobbly enough to have trouble scaling the buildings. He teetered on a low wall, arms spread like it was the beginning of a show, and Shizuo’s body was a tight line, ready to catch him should he fall.

“I missed you, really!” Izaya laughed, and Shizuo hoped it wasn’t sincere.

“You hate me, remember?” he said, and wondered why Izaya would sit curled up in such a place, old cigarettes and used condoms around, no easy escape.

“Oh yes, hate,” Izaya said, suddenly bitter. “Only you know, hate is but one side of a coin.”

Shizuo stared at him, watched as Izaya swayed, his fingers twitching. He remembered how Shinra wanted them to get on in high school and how instead, everything kept getting worse, jail and fires, knives and streetlamps, sweat and blood.

“You see, you might keep the coin in your pocket and never throw it, never even think of throwing it, hate, hate, hate, and because you don’t throw it, you forget it has that other side to it, but oh, don’t think that the world won’t make you remember!”

He was walking around on the wall, grinning at the sky like it was something else but emptiness littered with the light of dead stars. He turned on a step, almost falling to where Shizuo would have to catch him, and smiled at him like Shizuo was about to learn something that would kill him.

“So then, one day, after a year, after three years, after five, just once, you find yourself thumbing the coin, and, to kill time, to tempt fate, you take it out and flick it,” he went on, something cruel about it, like his words were a substitute for a knife. ‘Just once, Shizu-chan, but oh, with fate, once is enough! And then you— you watch it spin, and it doesn’t matter if you catch it, doesn’t matter if it lands on heads or tails – the only thing that matters is that you’ve already thrown it and remembered the possibility of the opposite of hate.”

Those eyes flashing at him, and how Shizuo hated them for reflecting him and all his sins.

“But the opposite of hate is—” Shizuo started, and imagined a coin, rotating. He imagined it at its peak, and hoped it would never have to fall.

“Oh, yes, of course!” Izaya said, and tilted his head to the side like Shizuo was a curiosity, a roadkill that caught his eye. “And I’ve tossed the coin, like a fool.”

There was something scary about Izaya in that moment –how his cheeks were flushed, how he kept swaying to the sides as if someone was holding a voodoo doll of him somewhere and was fiddling with it. When he fell off the wall at last, he stepped off it, deliberate, and Shizuo caught him like he’d been scared he would have.

“Shizu-chan is so warm,” Izaya said then, nose jammed into the hollow of Shizuo’s neck. “Must be the monster blood.”

“Izaya.”

“It makes sense, doesn’t it? You’re humanity’s exception! No wonder you’re mine, too.”

Later, after Shizuo kicked in the door to Izaya’s apartment and laid him out on the couch, Izaya caught his sleeve and whispered that it didn’t change a thing. When the knife slashed Shizuo’s forearm, it was a relief in a way.

*

When Shizuo calls Kasuka, he almost chokes on self-hatred.

“That much?” Kasuka asks, out of worry rather than surprise.

“I need to— help someone,” Shizuo says, and remembers how in all good stories the hero always has to lose something to gain something else. Then he laughs, because this is no story, and he’s no hero.

“I see,” Kasuka says after a moment of silence. “I’ll arrange it.”

Shizuo exhales, too shaky, and tries not to break Shinra’s windowsill.

“Be careful,” Kasuka adds, and Shizuo nods, even though Kasuka won’t see it.

“Thank you,” he breathes into the phone, and doesn’t promise to beat everyone to a pulp and get the money back right away just yet.

“I’m glad,” Kasuka says, then, and hangs up without explaining, leaving Shizuo to wonder how everything will change now. He sighs, and thinks that if they survive it all, he won’t mind anything, won’t complain even once. He will answer every question, and make hard to keep promises if it means he’ll get to talk about colors again.

“Once, Izaya told me that he’ll never let anyone kidnap him, because that would be it,” Shinra says, and Shizuo thinks that now, he’ll have to be extremely careful not to kill everyone in sight. “Why do you care, anyway?”

Shizuo doesn’t explain how Izaya told him he loved him in his own fucked up way, because nobody, not even Shinra, deserves to know just yet.

*

After the vodka and the coins, Shizuo didn’t see Izaya for weeks. When the flea finally crawled back to Ikebukuro, Shizuo didn’t know himself anymore, not even a little bit. He threw a few things but kept thinking of hands, and how maybe his own could do something good for once, only he couldn’t quite figure out what.

“Izaya,” he said at some point, and dragged him into a blind alley full of sagging trash bags by the sleeve, wondering what it meant when, yet again, Izaya wouldn’t even try to free himself. They stood there, watching each other, and Izaya looked smaller than ever before, so small that Shizuo felt scared of himself – drowning in that fur-lining coat and blinking too much, like he needed to clear his eyes of something.

“What do you want, Shizu-chan?” he said, trying for bored, but voice cracking on something desperate. Now he knew to look for it, Shizuo could see that hunger all over him, the skin that’s never been touched, the fingers that never touched skin. Those love letters to all humanity, forever unanswered, an empty mailbox somewhere, gathering dust.

“It’s all your own damn fault,” Shizuo choked out, because he’d spent the previous few days trying to imagine a life that wouldn’t be all about the two of them sharpening their teeth on each other, and had come up blank each time.

He reached out, slow, and Izaya startled, his body tilting as if it was trying to arch both towards Shizuo’s hand and away, hopeless and helpless.

There is something scary about two people that have never been touched before deciding to touch each other. The trust of it, offered out of necessity rather than earned, the nakedness of the act, skin bravely bared to something it’s never known before, all goose bumps, and will it hurt or will it not? A coin toss of a thing.

When Shizuo first touched Izaya that day, he wanted to grip, so he only brushed the skin with his fingertips. He wanted to bite, so he nipped. He wanted to shove, so he pushed gently instead, hand curled protectively over the back of Izaya’s head so that it wouldn’t hit the wall. He remembered his mother telling him to be careful around baby Kasuka, and explaining that, instead of hard skull, there was soft fontanel that had to be protected at all cost. He remembered cursing his fingers and always trembling, scared of himself, scared of the world, scared of table corners and wooden staircase steps.

He never would have guessed that touching Izaya would feel the same.

He collapsed into it, knees on concrete and forehead pressed to Izaya’s middle, because wasn’t that how people prayed? Izaya mumbled his name and cradled Shizuo’s head like the coin’s landed and like they had both lost the bet.

“After this, everything has to go back to how it was before,” Izaya whispered, and Shizuo agreed, because he would have agreed to anything just then. Under Izaya’s shirt, his fingers climbed up the ribs, and he decided to remember it even if it meant forgetting everything else, this sin of hands.

*

When they leave, it smells like rain. Good, Shizuo thinks. It will wash the blood away.

The directions take them to some abandoned warehouse, and Shizuo’s skin itches worse than that day in the alley, the wad of cash weighing in his pocket. No cigarettes.

“It’s almost like he’s worried about your health, no?” Shinra said before, and it took everything in Shizuo to not laugh hysterically. Now he smiles at Shizuo like everything’s alright.

“It’s best if I go alone, of course,” he says, and Celty’s fingers twitch. “That’s what was agreed, after all.”

Shizuo shakes his head.

“They’ll ask for you to throw the money first, and then God knows what they’ll do. If I’m with you, they’ll be too scared to cheat.”

“Maybe Celty, then—”

“Hey, Shinra,” Shizuo says, wishing it started raining already. “Why won’t you just let me kill them all?”

*

So they went back to how it’d been before, all hate, all violence, all distance, only everything became lonelier than before and Shizuo’s dreams were more blue than ever. The mug he’d drink from, the pillow he’d sleep on, the newspaper he’d read, everything—

How he’d catch himself glancing at the door to his apartment, stupid enough to hope for a knock.

“What’s with you, anyway?” Kadota would ask, “Sushi,” Simon would try, and all Shizuo could think of was how Izaya’s skin had been so cold, and that it was going to be autumn soon. He caught himself fingering a scarf once, pulling on the price tag, and he beat up dozens of wannabe gangsters later that day, but couldn’t beat the feel of wool away from his fingertips.

Shinra was the only one who wouldn’t ask what was wrong with him, and at some point Shizuo realized it was because he already knew.

“I always thought it would turn out like this,” he laughed, showing Shizuo a photo of himself and Izaya, high-school awkward, bad haircuts and too-wide smiles. Izaya wasn’t facing the camera, but looking away, the corner of his mouth about to go up or turn down. It was probably the latter, since Shizuo couldn’t imagine Izaya’s smile getting any wider.

“It was you, of course,” Shinra said, unnecessarily.

“It didn’t turn out like anything,” Shizuo mumbled, cold, cold, cold, even though Izaya had said he was warm.

“Say, are you lonely?”

The loneliest Shizuo ever felt was right after his fights with Izaya, when they’d go separate ways and the world would rush back in with all it lacked – not because it was gone, but because it’d never been there in the first place.

Say, are you blue?

And then Izaya stole his cigarettes, and someone took him.

*

“Someone saw him,” Celty types, and shows him a message board. A picture of Izaya, a half-smoked cigarette – not lighted – between his lips. Shizuo remembers putting it out before and storing it for later in the half-empty pack, and something breaks in him at the expression on Izaya’s face. He looks—

_once, Izaya told me that he’ll never let anyone kidnap him, because that would be it_

_—_vulnerable, almost. Like he wouldn’t notice if someone slipped a noose around his neck, like he’d forgotten about God and time and keeping his guard.

Bones, and feathers, and even the beak, and oh, how Shizuo will feast tonight, how he’ll gorge himself on screams.

Shinra pushes the door open, and in the few dim lights, their shadows are almost long enough to touch Izaya’s feet. Shizuo can’t bear to look at him, and can’t bear to look anywhere else – mouth split, wrists behind his back, somebody’s greasy hand curled on his shoulder and they better watch their fingers and memorize what they look like while they still have them.

Izaya’s eyes on him, shock stealing years away and leaving him younger and honest like murder.

“So he’s worth it after all?” The man who’s standing behind Izaya asks, and Shizuo wants to cry, because he never had the chance to learn. All their lives Shizuo prayed for this and right when he stopped, right when he thought he should buy tea and keep it in his apartment just in case, they fucking _took_ him—

“Shizu-chan?” Izaya croaks, a swelling on his face, and the surprise makes him look like someone who’s yet to grow up. There’s a knife pressed to his neck like Shizuo expected but it’s still unbearable to think of how every time Izaya swallows, his skin must press against it like it pressed against Shizuo’s fingers just the once.

“What’s _he_ doing here, anyway?” the man asks, and Shinra smiles.

“A safety measure, if you will,” he says, and when he throws the money, tied with a rubber band, Shizuo cracks his knuckles. The man frowns, and all the rats gathered on his sides eye the money near foaming at the mouth. It’s almost sad, how Shizuo will break their fingers before they get the chance to do anything else but look.

“Shizu-chan came for me?” Izaya says, and laughs his hyena laugh. Shizuo wants to yell at him to shut the fuck up, the edge of the knife right there—

And then it’s gone, and Izaya’s kicked forward. He falls to the ground face first, wrists bound, and Shizuo grins up at the roof that will shield his face from God.

After, bones crack like eggshells, and when Shizuo throws the bodies out the building, it’s already raining.

“That’s sky crying,” Izaya mumbles, leaning on Shinra, half-hurt, half-asleep.

“Yes,” Shizuo says, and wipes blood off his hands. “It’s crying just for you, ain’t that great?”

Izaya puts his finger where the knife was, eyes wide and scared like he’s an untamed animal caught digging in the trash, and Celty hands Shizuo the scarf she had wrapped in shadows inside her helmet for safe-keeping, the same one he ended up buying, ridiculously expensive wool and all his sushi savings gone. Shizuo wraps it around Izaya’s neck, and Izaya looks at him with more hatred than ever before.

Shizuo smiles, because it might well enough be the last time, and offers Izaya his hands, not for holding, but for keeping.

“I think they broke a rib or two,” Shinra says, and when Shizuo spits at the scattering of bodies, he thinks that the sky must forgive him.

*

It’s much later, Izaya bandaged and carried all the way to Shizuo’s apartment, that Shizuo learns touch. There’s space between them on the mattress and the only point of contact is when Shizuo puts his fingertips at the hollow of Izaya’s neck, trying to right the wrongs.

“I dream in blue as well,” he says, finally, and thinks of how birds can sit on power lines, safe from the current as long as nobody shoots them, and how from now on, he’ll keep knocking rifles off aim.

“Are you going to kill me in my sleep?” Izaya asks, and Shizuo smiles, because if Izaya’s planning to sleep, it only proves he can’t believe his own words himself.

“It was already too late when you told me about the coin toss,” Shizuo says, and puts his nose where his fingers just were, where Izaya smells human and alive and safe. “I already imagined the other side of it.”

“It’s good you’re a monster,” Izaya sighs. “I don’t like playing favorites with humans.”

Shizuo kicks his thigh with his knee, oh-so-light, and something flashes in the half-dark. There’s a coin between Izaya’s fingers, head or tails, head or tails, head or tails, and he throws, but Shizuo catches it before it can fall to a verdict.

“You didn’t say what was what, anyway,” he says, and tosses the coin out the open window, where it’ll fall to the ground, and where someone might pick it up later, for luck.

“Shizu-chan came for me,” Izaya says again, eyes too wide, and Shizuo thinks it might take him a while, this crazy man who’s learned to tell himself good morning and goodnight because others have long stopped bothering to.

When Shizuo falls asleep, there’s nothing blue in his dreams.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading!
> 
> Also, here's a link to my original story about stupid boys who get themselves involved in art theft if you're interested: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23463895/chapters/56249917


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